Ms Audry Deane:

I will deal very briefly with the SUSI issue as I am sure our colleagues from USI will have more to say on it. It is way too early to know, for the current academic year, how many people will come to us, but every year, particularly in the Dublin region, hundreds of thousands of euro are given out by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul to subsidise a dysfunctional grant provider system. It is very difficult for us, regardless of whether the grant applications are successful, to claw that money back. Everyone here is well aware of how transformative it is, particularly for families whose first child is going on to third level education, in terms of being a route out of poverty.

We cannot understand how SUSI was set up so poorly and the review makes for very sobering reading. I hope SUSI will get the resources it so obviously needs to be able to do its job effectively. Unfortunately, in terms of SUSI's first year of functioning, the hard cases are still coming home to roost. As late as last Friday, I heard from a student who had gone back to Maynooth to do a higher diploma to get a job. There was ping ponging back and forward with SUSI. It had the forms, it lost the forms and so forth. A form was missing and neither side could prove that it had been sent or received. The end result was that she was being billed for €6,500 by Maynooth, correctly from its perspective. She was not able to get SUSI to approve her grant and, as a result, was unable to access her higher diploma. She cannot use the qualification that she had received to gain employment. That is just one example of how difficult it can be for students who end up on the wrong side of SUSI. The human cost is quite sobering.